Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech

What has long been an EFF issue is once again making headlines. In recent days, the world is seeing damning reports of authoritarian regimes spying on their citizens using American- and European-made surveillance technologies, with new evidence emerging from Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Thailand.

While China's "Great Firewall" prevents citizens from accessing popular social media networks Twitter and Facebook, Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform not unlike Twitter, provides a vibrant alternative for China's ever-increasing community of netizens.

Though speech on the platform is controlled, an outpouring of anger from netizens toward the treatment of a June 23 train crash near Wenzhou by authorities, followed by the flooding of the network with protest photographs from the city of Dalian, has lead to a crackdown on users.

Every year, the South by Southwest (SXSW) media festival invites the Internet at large to contribute to the SXSW schedule by voting on thousands of submitted panels. Community votes—combined with editorial input from the SXSW staff and advisory board—ultimately decide the final panel schedule.

What follows are some choice panel proposals that address timely, interesting technology and freedom issues, and that usually feature EFF panelists and friends of EFF. If these catch your eye, grant them a thumbs-up vote!

EFF has joined Public Knowledge and other public interest groups in asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to clarify that the cell phone shutdown by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) earlier this month was a violation of American telecom laws. In an emergency petition filed Monday, the coalition urged the FCC to act quickly, as other governmental agencies may follow BART's illegal actions.

For years, Tunisians suffered in relative media silence as the Ben Ali regime curtailed digital rights, blocking websites and surveilling citizens. Then, thanks to the hard work of Tunisian free expression advocates who for many years worked to raise awareness of the country’s pervasive Internet controls, censorship fell along with the regime, with Ben Ali promising an end to filtering in his final speech on January 13 before fleeing to Saudi Arabia.

However, with Ben Ali gone, Tunisian courts have become the next critical battleground in the ongoing effort for a censorship-free Internet in Tunisia, with the Agence Tunisienne d'Internet (ATI) or Tunisian Internet Agency caught in the middle of implementing censorship orders and arguing in support of free expression.